I ride the bus as my only means of transportation and it is fascinating what you notice about folks as you are riding along side them. Lately, I am noticing clothes. So here are my thoughts on what we wear.
I have come to the realization that slogan clothes are ingenious. This is how it works. Designer ABC makes a red and blue sports leather jacket and sales it for $100.00. Cute jacket but no one walking down the street has a clue who made it and probably won’t stop the Brother or Sister to ask them who made it. So ABC designer takes a little more thread and puts ABC on the back of the jacket in bold letters and then charges $175.00 for the jacket. Nice profit for some extra thread, but that is not the ingenious part. Every time the person wears that jacket they are a walking billboard for that name brand. (There is a reason companies have free tee shirt booths at festivals, concerts, and sport arenas.) So now when the Brother or Sister walks down the street, the hundred or so people they pass that day become potential customers for ABC. Like I said ingenious…..but not a real big deal actually.
What is a big deal is how some folks dress. We are Africans living in the dispora (I know some folks are still coming to grips with that concept) and we should all carry ourselves with pride. And what we wear and how we wear it makes a statement about ourselves. Since I am an Afrocentric oriented person, I have a fondness for Afrocentric clothes or at least some Afrocentric patterns in our eurocentric clothing. This helps for us to reconnect to our ancestral roots. And when on a daily basis we exist in a society that either does not reflect our ancestral roots or worse tries to instill in us an inferior idealism concerning our ancestral roots, we need to counteract…get proactive.
A Kente tie or scarf is a nice touch to a business outfit. A way to include some African pride in our daily wear. The sad part is that there are some businesses where you can’t even do that much. Or WORSE there are businesses where we can...but we don’t. Some folks have this eurocentric ideal that it is not professional. I figure if a guy at work will wear a tie with Disney cartoon characters or a women will wear a scarf with Betty Boop all over it, then Brothers and Sisters a Kente tie or scarf is acceptable.
Point being that we as members of the African Dispora should act like it and look like it. Not just as an upliftment for our own self but as encouragement to other many Brothers and Sisters we pass every day in the street. If we can be a walking billboard for ABC designers and win over potential customers for their namebrand we should not even think twice about proudly wearing textile patterns of our motherland and awaking pride in her children we pass daily.
Hambree!
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